Nul Points

by Tim Moore

  I say as much to Daníel, who nods non-committally until I describe Eurovision as a musical beauty contest. ‘There’s nothing musical about it,’ he interrupts, a little sharply. ‘I admire ABBA, but that’s it. This contest means nothing, in terms of music, in terms of artistry, it’s just a silly competition. Sometimes it’s funny to watch, but it’s really sad too, because the music, you know, it’s lousy.’ The intensity of this outburst seems to shock Dan as much as me. Funny to watch? Lousy music? Well, you know, that goes without saying. Except that he’s just said it, and I’m not programmed to cope with hearing this sort of stuff from a contest veteran. Over previous months my Eurovision compass has been drastically reset, from magnetic scorn to due respect. I’ve been compelled by the force of Teigen to grasp the geopolitical, EU-defining clout Eurovision can still wield, and been brought face to Finn-face with its full destructive power. And now here’s some whippersnapper dissing it. There’s a slightly uncomfortable silence before he speaks again, this time in a conciliatory whisper. ‘That’s at least to my taste.’

  I cough, and riffle distractedly through my notebook. The jollities of our castle/Kristin introduction have allowed me to forget Dan’s initial reluctance to meet me; our conversation, I now remind myself, is unlikely to be completed without awkwardness. ‘So,’ I say, as bracing and businesslike as I’m able, ‘how do you get from escaping turtles to Eurovision?’

  Smiling again, just about, he tells me of Ný Dönsk’s late-eighties pop-rock adventures, the college gigs, the body painting, the ‘strange costumes’. ‘But it wasn’t a full-time job, still more like a time-consuming hobby. I did other stuff when I could.’ Indeed: although I maddeningly don’t find out about this until months after our meeting, Daníel’s extra-musical career encompassed an endeavour that would enliven any CV – when the state broadcaster set about dubbing several series of Top Cat into Icelandic, they hired him to do the voice of Benny.

  He was still living with his mum, and in Christmas 1988 met the girl who would become his wife. Shortly after, coming off stage at a Ný Dönsk gig in a Reykjavik café, he was approached by Valgeir Gujónsson, a songwriting stalwart who had entered two of the three Icelandic Eurovision qualifiers to date, and already triumphed once. ‘He said he liked my performance, and then asked me to do it with him.’ Only an awareness of Daníel’s already obvious distaste for the word ‘Eurovision’ – he often simply refers to it as ‘the gig in Lausanne’ – prevents me chiming in with a ribald snigger. ‘Of course I wasn’t too keen on these types of songs, but I really respected him as a musician and I wanted to work with him, to see how it was working with a professional. I’d only just started doing this band, you know, for a year and a half.’ Dan nods firmly, as if he’s only just understood the forces that drove him, against his better youthful judgement, on to that stage in Lausanne. ‘For the experience – that was the reason why I decided to take it on.’ Though I suspect he must also have been flattered by the approach. And as a stage-struck nineteen year old, the prospect of getting in front of a national TV audience, and then 500 million Europeans, would surely have been an enticing one.

  Apparently not. Daníel says he can’t really remember too much about the national qualifier, though it was his first time on TV (unusually so: in a pithy encapsulation of the country’s media-density/population ratio, the average Icelander has appeared on television four times). He recalls nothing of his four rivals, not even the two he only narrowly squeezed out. He’s blanked it all out, and he’s done so because for this very unusual nul-pointer, the most painful memories are of victory rather than abject defeat. For Daníel Ágúst, winning the qualifier was a far more appalling tragedy than losing the final.

  ‘Yeah, I hoped I wouldn’t win,’ he says, redirecting his visual attention from his fingernails to my face, as if to emphasise the sincerity of this arresting statement. ‘It was my last year in college, and the final exams were coming up in May and I wanted to do well in those. This contest was at the worst time, you know, and I thought it would ruin four years of hard work.’ He checks himself slightly. ‘I didn’t want to run away from the contest or anything, I really wanted to do the job properly, sing as well as I could. But all the time I was hoping, please don’t let me win this. My exams, the band’s first album … I have other things to do.’

  He means it, absolutely no doubt. While his more senior co-competitors still dreamt the Eurovision dream, Daníel had woken up and smelt the café. An uncomfortable truth had been working its way to the surface ever since Waterloo: Eurovision had stopped making stars. After their victory in 1976, Brotherhood of Man topped the chart in thirty-three countries, selling six million copies of Save All Your Kisses For Me – I can’t help thinking the word ‘somehow’ is missing from that statement – and Nicole’s A Little Peace shifted a million in the UK alone. These days, such feats are unimaginable: Céline Dion’s portentous 1988 success was, in hindsight, the exception that proved a rule.

  Even if you wanted to fashion a glittering career from belting out Eurosongs, which Dan emphatically didn’t, a Eurovision stage was no longer the place to fashion it. Too green to recall the contest’s glory years but smart enough to know they were long gone, for Daníel a Saturday night spent revising irregular verbs was more valuable than one frittered away serenading half a billion Europeans. He was the first performer I’d met not raised to respect Eurovision. Perhaps that was the secret Dan wanted to share with the moon: tell you what, crater-face, this whole thing is shite. Listening to him I can sense the holy grail of Abbadom being tarnished – it’s as if Jahn and Finn and all the rest have died in vain, inspired by some defunct, discredited ideal to chase an impossible dream.

  Daníel diplomatically stresses how much he learnt from working with Valgeir Gujónsson – ‘it gave me a lot, especially in terms of how to interpret lyrics, how to use my vocal cords, and I’m ever grateful for that’ – but struggles not to bear him a grudge for writing the winner. Did he like the song? ‘Hmmmmm,’ he says at length, a noise that can be effectively translated as ‘Look – Iceland is a small place, and I’m a nice guy, so please don’t ask me questions like that.’ But it was a decent tune, I suggest, and the lyrics were pleasingly offbeat. ‘Yeah,’ he says, with a dry, low-watt chuckle. ‘I always wondered what the moon found out.’

  Cheering up my nul-pointers by mulling ruminatively over the happy memories of their victorious qualification has become such an ingrained interview gambit that I find myself banging on and on about it, even as Daníel’s voice fades to a glum whisper. ‘No matter what I thought, everybody seemed, well, to like the song, and the group performance, so I just had to go with it,’ he mumbles, addressing himself to a biro. I can’t catch some of his words, and this isn’t the time to shove the recorder right under that beard or snap at him to speak up. Dan sniffs and surveys the ceiling. ‘But, you know, I guess that when you are a participant in a competition, you should always be prepared for the chance of winning.’ It’s extraordinary – a perfect inversion of the heart-punching anticipation with which all my other nul-pointers had contemplated the possibility of final victory.

  Daníel’s prize for winning the nationals was – in a neat twist on the poisioned-chalice theme – a cactus. ‘I took it with me to the gig in Lausanne for good luck,’ he says, that bitter grin softening into something more playful. ‘Don’t win! Don’t win! Don’t win!’ His gleeful chants fill the dark eaves with more happy noise than they know what to do with: the echoes bounce around us for some time. ‘It worked perfectly,’ he smiles, when they’ve stopped. Again I’m bewildered by this upside-down conversation.

  With the agony of success now behind us, Daníel eases back in his leather chair and prepares to savour defeat. ‘When they heard I was going to Lausanne, my family and friends, and the band, they all just thought it was really funny,’ he says, legs stretched out, hands behind his head. ‘And actually it was. The whole trip to Switzerland was fantastic, so much fun. The people I was with, we
laughed our heads off.’

  What with backing singers and technicians there were ten in the Icelandic gang, and Daníel reminisces fondly on their rapport, with particular reference to the Gruyere-based tomfoolery depicted in that introductory filmette. I ask how their famously sensible hosts reacted to this flippancy and its associated shortfall in respect, and Daníel shrugs slightly and says, ‘We were just amusing ourselves. We weren’t rude to anyone.’ Was there a what-the-hell thing going on, given the diminished expectations derived from the unshakeable mediocrity of previous Icelandic performances? ‘We never talked about things like that. We never talked about the competition, we were just having fun.’

  The fun wound down, though, as the contest proper approached. Daníel was never comfortable with his meet-and-greet commitments – ‘I’m shy, I don’t like shaking hands, all the smiling stuff’ – and with Iceland still a Eurovision parvenu, and its teenage representative a fish out of indie waters, there was little mingling with fellow contestants. ‘We were told to mix, but I just felt silly. It was like some kind of gala, pfffff, I don’t know.’ He thoughtfully twists a small tuft of beard. ‘Although some Maltese guy did send me a postcard afterwards.’ Not sure how that happened: Malta weren’t even competing.

  Dan freely admits that a lot of what occurred in the day or so before the final ‘didn’t get put in a safe compartment in my memory’. ‘I remember Céline Dion, of course, and the guy from Modern Talking who I think wrote the Austrian song – it was really something to see him, in his big blond hair and his huge suntan.’ Daníel nobly sustains his interest, and a sardonic smile, as I detail the notable career achievements of Dieter Bohlen, who that year made Eurovision history by writing two entries (German and Austrian), and whose contributions as performer, producer and composer have put his name on 290 million record covers. ‘Well, I haven’t forgotten his leather trousers,’ is the considered response.

  Ah: trousers. I tactfully suggest that Daníel’s own legwear that night, those pleated, billowing mainsails, might establish him as pot to Dieter’s kettle. A fair-cop nod. ‘Well, yes, but they weren’t my choice.’ Not for him a Teigen-esque sartorial showdown with the authorities. ‘Someone told me to wear these trousers, so I did. I just accepted it as another part of my role, another part of the task I had to finish.’ So there’s Dan, out on a stage he doesn’t want to be on, wearing strides he doesn’t want to wear, about to sing a song he doesn’t want to sing. The grim fatalism is coming back.

  ‘Yup, I was nervous,’ he murmurs, narrowing those slightly sunken eyes. ‘If you listen back to the performance, I was quite shaky on the first line.’ I have, I say, and yes – you were, a little. He’s not offended. ‘So it was not a good start. I went off on the wrong foot, if you want. But I think I finished it, the rest of the song, quite well. So I don’t know if my singing affected it, that we got zero points …’ Not at all, I say, wondering how I can explain that the reason they did wasn’t the song, or his voice, but the expression on his face. An expression that I now see wasn’t a sneer, or a throwaway smirk, but the pained, whey-faced grimace of a timid young man doing something against his will. To look at, but not only to look at, he was a pale but stout-hearted conscript heading out alone across no man’s land. Try to tell a three-minute joke the next time you’re in the throes of chronic indigestion and you’ll know how Daníel felt. Do it with a starched tarpaulin tied round each leg and you’ll know how he looked, too.

  Other than commending the professionalism that coaxed a solid vocal performance from Eurovision’s most reluctant competitor, I don’t know what else to say about his time on-stage. Except that bit at the end, when … ‘Oh, I know what you’re going to say.’ With a self-mocking, self-conscious and rather girlish giggle, Daníel grabs a handful of black velour from his tracksuit’s chest and presses it to his puckered lips.

  ‘I don’t know why I did that kissing thing,’ he says, ‘it’s so silly. Guess I must still have been nervous.’ Has he always worn a crucifix? A look of bemused merriment. ‘You look at your DVD again. It’s a pagan symbol – the hammer of Thor.’

  Daníel was third last on the stage, but doesn’t recall any of the acts that went before other than his immediate predecessor. ‘That Greek woman – she was pretty good.’ And after? ‘Well, I’m sure you know that the guys who won were last out,’ he says, sticking his tongue very hard into a bearded cheek and raising a sardonic eyebrow. ‘Rock Me, baby. A lovely song, oh yes.’ His cheek tents out further. ‘I was really glad to end up last when I learnt that this song got the first place. Then it all seemed quite logical to me.’ We share a rather fatuous chortle.

  Daníel’s green-room memories aren’t so much patchy as threadbare. He doesn’t remember any ratcheting sense of gloom as the juries came and went without saying ‘Islande’, nor whether there was any sympathetic camaraderie from fellow competitors after the voting finished. He’s watched the 1989 contest since on video, ‘once, about ten years ago’, but even that failed to defibrillate his flat-lined powers of recall. He just shrugs helplessly as I try to get him going, and in the end I find I’m going through the usual nul-points debrief on autopilot. All the succour and balm I’m accustomed to dispensing at this point splurges uselessly out over a wound that has never existed. His song wasn’t the worst at all, I drone, and single men never get any sympathy votes, and as for the Dick van Danes making the podium, well – those 1989 juries weren’t just out of touch, but half blind and stone deaf. And then I’m chuntering on through stage two of my spiel, saying how it’s better to get zero than three, before winding up with the usual schadenfreude finale, contrasting Riva’s post-Eurovision career implosion with his quarter-million album sales. Throughout it all Daníel smiles gently, as if he’s doing the humouring.

  ‘One hundred points, ten points, three … it was all irrelevant to my state of mind,’ he announces, expansively. ‘Some of the other Icelanders with me … well, there were different takes on it. One of them …’ He checks himself again, as the diplomatic vigilance required to ensure an easy life in the small world that is the Reykjavik music scene kicks in: it’s difficult not to recall at this point that Valgeir Gujónsson, the song’s composer, was in Lausanne as Daníel’s pianist. ‘Maybe I shouldn’t go into that. It was obvious that one of them didn’t like it, that we didn’t get any points, but the rest of us really didn’t talk about it. OK, that was that, finished.’

  Still, it was Saturday night, and as a teenage Icelander Daníel knew what he had to do. ‘We got drunk and sang and told stories, the usual Icelandic-having-fun stuff,’ he says, with a laugh. ‘It wasn’t quite a celebration, but our posse went out into Lausanne and had a great time.’ An achievement in itself, I suggest, and Daníel coaxes out a polite smile.

  So the next day you all flew home, and – ‘I don’t remember,’ he interrupts, and I think: You don’t remember? You’ve just performed for a live TV audience almost 2,000 times huger than your national population, and it’s gone as wrong as it could go, and you don’t remember whether the next day you flew home to face the funereal music or, I dunno, stayed behind to explore the 500 different hardware models on display at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology’s Computer Museum? ‘I was quite unconscious of everything, as I said, I was young and I wasn’t paying too much attention to the details of what was going on, or my surroundings.’

  Feeling impotent and slightly exasperated, I say that, well, anyway, at some point you came home, and there would surely have been a fairly major reaction, from the media and on the streets of Reykjavik, and how was all that? He gently touches his head with one hand and shrugs helplessly: sorry, it’s all gone. The virulent collective amnesia that wiped the 1989 result from the nation’s memories has clearly not spared their 1989 entrant. A couple of weeks later Birna helpfully recalls the Icelandic Monday-morning front pages: Dan and the gang grinning rather manically and holding both hands aloft, each with a linked thumb and forefinger. It’s zero, but we’re a-OK.
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br />   Time to move on. I ask Dan whether he got anything positive out of the experience, and sensing that the Eurovision end is nigh, he instantly brightens. ‘All I really regret now is the first line of my performance,’ he says. ‘But it was a fantastic experience, singing in front of 500 million. I value that, it’s quite a gift to someone who’s starting his career.’ Somewhere in the unseen sky the clouds part, and an oblique shaft of dust-particled sunlight bursts through the small window behind me. ‘No one in Iceland gave me a hard time about the gig in Lausanne, or if they did I didn’t notice. There was no blame, no pointed fingers. I didn’t have to ask for forgiveness. And the zero-factor … well, it meant I could start over and learn new things.’

  A heaven-sent teacher’s strike allowed Dan to pass his exams without taking them, and for a while he considered studying sociology at university. His girlfriend discovered she was pregnant – I later calculate that the baby was conceived just prior to Daníel’s Lausanne trip – and though they hadn’t planned a family, when the daughter who remains their only child was born in December ‘we just embraced the situation’. Ný Dönsk’s debut album was completed and released just before Christmas and swiftly went gold, thereby shelving that planned future in social science. ‘You could say 1989 was a big year,’ he concludes, drily, ‘and that this gig in Lausanne wasn’t at all the biggest thing.’

  In the five years afterwards Daníel recorded many further gold-selling albums with Ný Dönsk – ‘maybe five, maybe seven’, he says, with that now-traditional mastery of detail. His songwriting contribution swelled with each album, until he was responsible for ‘at least half’: ‘I was writing about society, anger, death, myself, friendship,’ he says, and I shed an inner tear for the reptilian pet-shop breakout described in his first lyrical foray.